Your story has three acts - Part II

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"Four shalt thou not count, neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out!"

- Michael Palin

I wanted to continue the topic I began in a previous column because the topic is terribly complex, and it happens to hit close to the root of my true passion: story.

Story is, in some ways, similar to architecture. Building designers know that the materials you use, purpose of the building and aesthetic considereations dictate the requirements of a particular structure, but all buildings follow the same fundamental physical laws. The possibilities offered by a steel skeleton are different from stone blocks, building on sand is not the same as building on granite, and an apartment building necessitates different technique than a grocery story, but the equations describing gravity, friction and wind shear are identical throughout. In the case of story, medium and genre behave as materials, geography and technique, but story's ambiguous nature doesn't lend itself to objective critical analyses as well as physical structures.

Despite the fact that we, as a species, began constructing stories before buildings our understanding of engineering is far more concrete than our understanding of narrative form. Story is not a hard science but architecture follows physical laws less susceptible to subjective interpretation. When a building collapses there is usually little debate as to whether or not it worked. The rubble surrounding a failed story is less obvious to all witnesses. Building analysis involves some subjective interpretation: what makes a building pretty? should a building be pretty? - but whether or not the building works as a tool can be quantified. The only real quantities usable in determining the success or failure of a narrative work are its monetary productivity and number of fans - but do either of these actually reflect the strengths or weaknesses of an individual story?

At this point in history we're still trying to determine which of the rules guiding story are akin to the rules of materials, and which ones are more similar to gravity. In fact, Robert McKee says his motivation for writing Story and conducting his seminar series was the degredation of our cultural understanding of story. According to McKee, the quality and consistency of storytelling as a craft was much stronger at the beginning of the 19th century than in the year 2000. This loss of knowledge is not unprecedented - only recently have construction methods equaled some aspects of ancient Roman techniques. The human species lost the best known recipe for concrete for over a millenium and the largest concrete dome in the world is now over 2000 years old. The recipe for concrete is much more solid than the recipe for a quality story.

I argue that three-act structure is a fundamental law of narrative, like gravity is a fundamental law of the physical universe. Our understanding of this law is murky, at best. Too often storytellers focus on three-act structure as a guide to pacing - which I regard as a separate issue entirely. Pacing is subject to the strictures of media, genre and form, three-act structure is universal in principle. All stories have three acts - beginning, middle and end. Explanations of three-act structure often focus on the relationship and ratios between these sections - but this is delving into the realm of pacing. Every story needs to have a beginning - a portion that introduces the characters and setting, time to establish the premise of the story and rules of the world. Every story needs to have a middle - an escalation of the narrative theme and conflict, time to develop the characters and plot. Every story needs an ending - the climax of storylines and culmination of characters, time to tie up the threads and unify the narrative. This is the essence and entirety of three-act structure, the use of a beginnig, middle and end. The application, technique and form of these acts varies from story to story, but an absence or failing in any of these basic ingredients leads to a meaningless pile of rubble.